Lost Dogs

While the man at the Wyoming service station was fixing our water pump a beautiful Brittany came past, wagged his tail at the filling station operator, and trotted toward the nearby house. I asked the man if the dog was a good hunter and he grinned.

"Oh, I don't hunt," the man said. "That dog's just passing through. Stopped off six years ago."

There are gypsy dogs who see the country, there are wild dogs who have felt the pull of their wolfish ancestors, and there are lost dogs, some of them tragically afraid in an unknown world of fearsome strangers and mysterious terrors. And there are owners ranging from professionals, who run dozens of hunting dogs and accept an occasional loss as a sad part of the game, to weeping youngsters whose world has collapsed.

Dog stories become fables, although the truth is often stranger than the fiction. There is the recurrent tale of dogs who come home from incredible distances, and there are equally poignant stories of dogs who have waited through starvation for masters who may have gone forever. Dog stories tend to be emotional, and when I became hooked on the pointing breeds and their human-instilled instincts (did you ever really think of what is involved in finding and pointing a bird while waiting an hour for a shooter?) I was fascinated by lost dogs, the wonder of their noses, their incredible intelligence and their incredible stupidity. A great many bird dogs are lost because we have extended their ranges and bred the drive into them. Trailing hounds are lost because of their single purpose that overcomes even their survival instincts. But this is not a learned discourse on dog training or handling. I guess it is just a gee-whiz comment on lost dog wonders, and I begin with the Afghan and the trip to Bermuda.

There is a freeway (I-90) that passes Bozeman, Montana, and we follow it part way to the airport at Belgrade, following it as it swings around Bozeman with a couple of exits there. The Afghan was at the east exit when I first saw it, standing at the side of the road as if expecting a car to stop and pick it up. The Afghan is regal enough to get attention and this one was showy, even to a bird-dog man.

It was two weeks later I saw the Afghan again. It was at the same spot on the interstate, and although its coat remained glossy it was thin and I suspected it might be lost. Now I don't know why Bermuda becomes important, but that was the year we went there, the year the dog stayed by a highway overpass while we went fishing thousands of miles away.

Back from Bermuda, we were driving past Bozeman from the airport when my wife Debie and I again saw the Afghan beside the road, emaciated and ragged, trying to eat something--a bit of trash that had some scent of food. So I stopped the car and tried to get near it but it ran under the overpass just a few yards away, going with the shambling gait of weakness. Although I could not get near it we left some dog food at its station and I called the Bozeman animal shelter, where they said they'd had a report of a lost Afghan. I haven't seen the dog since so I suppose it finally met whomever it was waiting for--after at least six weeks.

Wide-ranging trailing hounds, they of the "cold" noses, are lost by thousands each hunting season, most of them getting back some way. I have hunted in a national forest where deer dogs are used and have met them in varied stages of suffering, some of them trying to climb into my truck, and some of them slipping into trailside brush. I have walked up to a pointing dog that acted a little strangely and found him pointing a prone Walker hound that had finally given up and was barely alive in a patch of weeds.

It is scent that brings lost dogs home, we're sure, and it is the enormous memory banks of canine scent we will never understand, no matter how many laboratories and computers examine them. It is this other world of smell that enables a retrieving pointer to hold a dead bird in its mouth and point a live one twenty feet away, and the matter is so awesome that old dog trainers change the subject after brief discussion. When a dog finds its way home from considerable distance it is usually scent that makes it possible, but unless he follows his own trail the chances are that it will take a long while--a period in which he catches the general scent of his home area, the more specific scent of his community--and then his exact doorstep by the elimination of thousands of distracting scent trails.

You will note that I am waxing authoritative on something I know no more about than anyone else who has greeted a be-draggled wanderer after giving him up. It is simply that I spend much of my time writing about and watching hunting dogs and have thus acquired bravado on the subject. I have watched a tired dog perk up_after three thousand miles in a car_twenty miles from home, jump up and down five miles from home, and start barking while a mile away.

Now I have heard learned explanations of scent and its distribution, and dogs have been able to find everything from lost eyeglasses to heroin, but some of the failures are as spectacular as the triumphs. Three of us hunted on a snowy hillside for ruffed grouse--an area of patchy woods and open parks--and we were using two old veterans of the country, good Brittany buddies who approached the project with slavering, conniving and sly looks. It was not a strange hillside for them, but they would become lost within minutes and need to be tracked down. One of them, completely confused, stood and barked for help. After each had become lost twice we took them off the hill. The scent had failed them, even though snow is not generally a deterrent.

The general rule is that very dry weather is bad for scenting, heat is derogatory, and rain washes scent away, but there are those days when a usually reliable dog stands with a foot inches from a dead bird and stares at his master for instructions--the same dog who homed in on a kill from fifty feet the day before. It is when the scent doesn't work right that dogs are lost, and little is said generally of the wanderers who are searched for after most of the big field trials.

There is the old trick so often employed by hound users. Leave a piece of your clothing near where you last saw the fugitive and come back the next day. Thousands of dogs have been found lying beside a shirt or jacket, but the part we don't know is how many miles they traveled in the general area before they caught the familiar scent. It becomes eerie.

Old Spike disappeared in a Florida forest--hundreds of square miles of piney woods, wiregrass, palmetto, and scrub oak. Spike, a Brittany old enough to know better, had been lost before, being a careless wanderer not above following a deer briefly if no one was watching. I last heard his bell early in the afternoon, and late that night Debie and I were on the scene with the truck lights on and making all the noise we could--firing the usual shotgun blasts and driving the sand roads for miles near where he had disappeared. We also commented on Spike's general character and tried to tell ourselves it was good riddance. We posted a bulletin board message at the nearest country store, and it was shortly after that it began to rain--hard.

"There goes the scent he'd have to follow," I said. "The old fool would have barely enough sense to backtrail himself with it. Now he's really a goner and we'll have to wait for someone to read his tag and get in touch."

None of this is fun, but humans did it to themselves when they taught pointing dogs to range--and range still farther. Some ransoms for lost dogs are pretty steep.

"We'll put out the dog box from the truck," Debie said, "and I'll fix a pan of dog food and a pan of water. Then you can check tomorrow morning."

Like flowers at a funeral I felt it would accomplish no particular good for the subject but helped set out the dog box and Debie fixed the pans. The whole works was set at the edge of a timber patch where I'd last heard old Spike's bell. I explained to Debie the slim chance of his coming that way, but most of the trip home was pretty quiet. It always is when there's a dog gone--unless you try to cover up the pall that has descended.

It was long before daylight when I struck the headlight beams into the woods again, and before I took to some more sand roads I started to drive past the dog box, knowing the pans of food and water would be a rather pathetic scene. But Spike was there, and although the food had been eaten he was a quivering, cowering little wretch, somewhat afraid of me. He did not get lost again, and it may be he had tasted the true ashes of terror. Most hunting dogs are not equipped for survival on their own. One seldom-realized fact is the distance a dog travels in an hour, and the thought that one might have gone a hundred miles in twelve hours is staggering. Watch a healthy bird hunter on the move. A hundred miles? A thousand checks of places that look right or smell just a little bit right? And is there some special instinct beyond scent and eyesight? A guiding hand?

There are unexplained losses. There was the time I misplaced two pointing dogs at once in a series of ridges and ledges, one of them wearing an electronic beeper and the other a bell. Two hours later I could hear both beeper and bell from different directions but no amplified whistle or gunshot could bring them nearer. I finally ran down both dogs, finding them confused and glad to see me, and my analysis is that they had considered backtrails and were confused by echoes. I don't know when I have been so tired.

Cold trails? Perhaps it is the bloodhound who is best on them, but an English pointer can follow one hours old as a routine matter. I have no doubt the retrievers can do the same but they seldom have the occasion to. My old English pointer disappeared on a mountain in scattered snow. We had found no birds and I suspected she had, for once, abandoned me and gone "self-hunting," as the trainers say. It was still early in the day when I gave up and went home for help and long-suffering Debie was left with the truck near where I had started walking that morning. She had a binocular view of a nearly bare mountainside, more than a half a mile of unobstructed grass, rocks, and snow. She had parked on a little ridge for a better view of the spot I had left from early that day and at dusk she saw a speeding speck that grew into a pointer at top speed and the racer slid to a stop where the truck had been parked that morning.

There are certain conditions that seem to destroy any scent, and I suspect that the truly lost dog simply encounters a stretch of his back track that carries nothing to smell. The really top hounds will cut wide circles to pick up a trail again. Perhaps many bird dogs lack that finesse.

Some expert fox hunters showed me how hard it was for their Walkers and Black and Tans to trail across pavement or on plowed ground. I once found it impossible to keep track of a dog that was continually lost in brush somewhere beside an old abandoned asphalt road I was walking on. I had been hunting in swampy land and was wearing rubber boots, and it finally soaked in that the dog simply could not trail me on the hot asphalt but was not wise enough to recognize his problem and kept running off into the brush, circling behind me and getting lost. Finally, I put him on a lead.

Probably worst of all are the bird dogs that trail deer, a strange phenomenon of breeding that somehow has retained the wrong hunting instincts. Such dogs may starve, and they may be lost for a week or forever, unable to resist the urge they have been taught is wrong. Some true addicts never change.

Wanderer, fumbler, self-hunter, ancestor worshiper. Genes from ancient blood. Have the breeders really won? RWOL

"Lost Dogs" is excerpted from Field Days, by Charley Waterman. Copyright © 1995 by Charley Waterman. Copyright © 1995 by Michael McIntosh. Reprinted by permission of Countrysport Press, 1515 Cass Street, Traverse City, MI 49684.

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